Uzi Ben Zvi
preprint
The biblical story of eating from the Tree of Knowledge and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is traditionally interpreted in terms of sin and punishment. This article proposes an alternative reading grounded in two complementary frameworks: the Interface Theory of Consciousness (Ben-Zvi, 2025), which offers an evolutionary and neurological account of the emergence of human consciousness,...
Bruno Abbondanza
preprint
Nonordinary experiences of consciousness, including out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, mystical states, psychedelic experiences, and profound alterations of self-experience, are often interpreted through neuropsychological and psychiatric categories such as hallucination, dissociation, perceptual alteration, or brain anomaly. Such categories are clinically necessary when the...
Hüseyin Beyköylü, Josi Marschall, Elio Sjak-Shie et al.
preprint
Virtual reality psychedelic experiences (VRPEs) may offer accessible alternatives to substance-induced psychedelic experiences, but their phenomenology and how set and setting factors shape the experience remain underexplored. We conducted a study in a naturalistic festival setting where participants (N = 210) engaged with a 7-minute VRPE while continuous intensity ratings and physiological...
Uwe Hobohm
While numerous mystical encounters have been described in the literature, these experiences were hardly considered in the cognitive sciences appropriately. In general mystical accounts were either interpreted as impermanent subjective feelings outside the grasp or even interest of scientific investigation. Or mystical experiences are discussed within and mixed with religious belief systems...
Suresh Kumar.S
preprint
The computational mind approach was conforming to neural models of material mind based on theories like Neural Correlates of Consciousness. Thinkers like Chalmers posed the Hard Problem of consciousness arguing on the theme of an extended mind going beyond the brain. Gödel incompleteness theorem, called into question the power of mathematics to explain all of reality — along with the hypothesis...
Jesús Isaac Castillo-Sánchez
preprint
Abstract The COMP006 Phase 3 trial showed that 39% of patients with treatment-resistant depression (TRD) respond to a single 25 mg dose of psilocybin, while 61% do not — at identical dose, protocol, and pharmacological exposure. No mechanistic explanation for this heterogeneity has been established. Here we propose and validate a two-threshold model in which the psilocybin dose-response...
Tom Murray, Thomas McConkie, Matthew D. Sacchet
preprint
Contemplative science is entering a “third wave” that investigates advanced meditative development, including the study of advanced states and practitioners and the phenomenology and neurocognitive correlates of enduring trait transformations (meditative development). This paper argues that these research directions would benefit from the systematic inclusion of adult cognitive-developmental...
Yury Berdinsky
preprint
Why are physical processes in the brain accompanied by subjective experience at all-by the redness of red, the taste of coffee or the feeling of pain? This puzzle, known as the "hard problem of consciousness", has for centuries been left to metaphysics, because from the outside we see only a mechanism: ionic currents, neuronal discharges and the cogwheels of the connectome. The present work...
Ross Wilson
preprint
This paper resolves the Hard Problem of Consciousness by framing subjective experience as the result of recursive identity continuity governed by the Law of Lawful Recursion (LLR). Consciousness is not emergent, illusory, or mystical. It is what happens when a system internally models itself across transformation without structural drift. The paper introduces validator structures as the lawful...
Wenge Huang
preprint
Altered states of consciousness (ASC) induced by meditation, psychedelic drugs, or impending death are quite a fascinating and important field of investigation. This paper argues that ASC essentially have nothing to do with consciousness, but a story about perception.Our study starts from summarizing four essential phenomena (hallucinations, paranormal phenomena, mystical experiences and...